Nicholas Barry

I'm really having a lot of fun managing the interns, both for Davis Dollars and in Senator Steinberg's office. Especially at work, I'm building what I think will be a really strong internship program that will be able to accomplish a lot - not just getting our job duties done, but making big changes in Sacramento. My feeling is that I'm really on to something big - I can't do the concept justice in a few brief lines here, but the critical elements are:

Leadership training for everyone; a network structure in which people lead people below them, and train them to be leaders

An open organizational structure in which everyone (or nearly everyone) interfaces with the outside world, thus maximizing potential impact

A flat, decentralized hierarchy in which people and sections of the network can experiment with interesting ideas

I'll write more about these in future posts. I've heard a lot about the last one in articles and books, but I have almost never come across the first two in my readings. I got the idea for the open organizational structure from a really interesting book by a sociologist, Rodney Stark, called The Rise of Christianity, explaining the extremely fast growth of Christianity in the early centuries after Christ's death. He cites the importance of a fast-growing religion maintaining itself as an open network, where each node (person) is actively trying to convert new people. Mormonism, he observes, is growing at the same rate that early Christianity was growing (40% growth per decade). The application of this to my internship program is not, of course, to convert people to some sort of religion - the general idea is that an open network can reach a lot of people, and influence behavior and spread ideas. Lots of social movements and grassroots campaigns do the same thing - they encourage volunteers and members to continue trying to bring new people on board. My hope is that our internship program will be able to recruit allies outside our office to work on projects in the community.